THREATS AND SLAPPs AGAINST JOURNALISTS THREATEN FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN THE REGION OF THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA
Ljubljana, 18th November 2021
Members of the Slovenian PEN Center are alarmed by the growing number of online smear campaigns and hate speech, accompanied by SLAPPs and complaints against journalists for their critical writing about the ruling politics or the corruption links between politics and business. Strategic lawsuits against public participation exhaust media companies and individual journalists financially and spiritually, which leads to self-censorship and limitations of freedom of speech.
Pressure on journalists is not happening only in Slovenia, where the government held the Slovenian Press Agency without remittances for 312 days despite the warnings from European institutions and non-governmental organizations thus breaking the law. False patriotism, used by many as an excuse for hate speech towards the critics, is gaining undreamed-of proportions in the region of the former Yugoslavia.
The most acute example is the current pogrom against columnist Boris Dežulović, who in his column "Fuck Vukovar", drew attention to the irrational idolatry of the dead and the neglect of the living with their current problems, including high emigration toll from the city of Vukovar. Dežulović has been striving for tolerance among former war opponents for years and is a signatory of the Declaration on the Common Polycentric Language (https://hr2.wiki/wiki/Declaration_on_the_Common_Language) as well as a recipient of the European Media Award in 2013. He is now facing death threats, his private address is published and the nationalists are calling for his lynching. Croatian PEN issued a statement that the Slovene PEN Center also signed:
» The Croatian PEN strongly condemns the numerous and increasingly distributed death threats against writer and journalist Boris Dežulović. Regardless of how we perceive his text and how we experience the opening of Vukovar's war wounds, intimidation and public calls for the lynching of a writer because of the written word, are unacceptable in a free country. «
A serious case of violence against journalists comes from Belgrade as well. Anti-war and human rights activist and journalist Aida Čorović threw an egg into the mural of Ratko Mladić in the centre of Belgrade. Mladić, convicted by the Hague Tribunal, is guilty of thousands of deaths of innocent civilians, mass rapes, ethnic cleansing, and the greatest genocide since World War II at Srebrenica. There is a Serbian nationalist milieu that honors him despite his Hague conviction and his mural serves as the evidence for it. After the deed, Sixty-year-old Aida was violently apprehended by the unofficial members of the city guard and arrested by the state police. As it is understood, she had been beaten and released later. Many supporters expressed their disagreement with the nationalist policies and organized a public protest in support of Aida Čorović.
With the cases of Dežulović and Čorović, we cannot look away from the prosecution of Slovenian journalists, various indictments filed with the Financial administration of the Republic of Slovenia, complaints, and lawsuits that are officially filed by a private individual but publicly supported by the government. Such attitude towards the freedom of speech and press is destroying the foundations of democracy and is pushing the journalists, who seek to inform the public, to the margins and is treating them as criminals and not as the fourth branch of government. At a time when journalism is becoming increasingly dangerous, it is no coincidence that this year's Nobel Peace Prize is shared between Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov and Filipino journalist Maria Ressa, who says:
“The battle of our generation is the battle for truth. With the help of technology, a lie repeated a million times becomes a fact. Without facts, we don’t have truth. Without truth, there is no trust. Without all three, you can’t have democracy. This is why democracy is broken around the world.”
Board of Slovene PEN center
PEN Albanian PEN center
PEN România
Board of the PEN Centre of Bosnia and Herzegowina
